Immortality
by Silk Weaver
Summary: Reno claims that the really good Turks can’t die. He uses Tseng and Vincent Valentine as his examples. They both should be dead many times over, yet they’re still around to tell him to stop getting such stupid ideas." Turk story, with Vincent.


**Author's Notes:** This one is based on something I put in "Shinra Employees." It was "Reno claims that the really good Turks can't die. He uses Tseng and Vincent Valentine as his examples. They both should be dead many times over, yet they're still around to tell him to stop getting such stupid ideas." I was feeling like writing something with the Turks, and I just decided to use this for it.

I put Vincent in because he was mentioned in the prompt, and I didn't want him to just pop up randomly in Reno's explanation.

* * *

**Immortality**

The Turks

"Is everyone in place?" Tseng asks, speaking into his phone. They only had ten minutes before their target got back to his house, and they needed to act fast. Tseng wasn't prone to nervousness, but this time, he had every reason to be. This mission was vital, and all of the Turks knew it. It was so important that they'd even managed to get Vincent Valentine, the former Turk, to help them. He was standing behind Tseng, still striking without his red cloak.

There was a chorus of affirmatives through the PHS. "Of course we are, yo. C'mon, we're not going to mess this one up," Reno said, but there was the slightest tremor of excitement in his voice as well. "You grab the stuff while Rude makes sure you have your ten minutes, and 'Lena and I get it to the bossman." Reno was happy about this mission, Tseng knew. Finally, they were the good guys, instead of the menace in the background. Here was something they, and only they, could do to help the Planet and the people. It seemed immature to Tseng, but Reno had always had a certain degree of childishness to him.

Everything was ready, then. "All right, let's begin," Tseng said, and then snapped his phone shut. He stepped forward, toward the house, and Vincent followed him silently.

He and Vincent had ten minutes to search the house. There were some papers in the place, secret documents that, if they found them, would stop what appeared to be an attempt at recreating Hojo's experiments with Sephiroth. They had to find those documents and get them to Rufus intact, in order for the group to be exposed. Tseng would have liked to simply kill them all, but he didn't have enough Turks for that. He would have to satisfy himself with this.

Jimmying the lock only took a moment, and traps and alarms took a few more seconds, but it felt wasted. There was not enough time. The man whose home this was would be coming soon, to take the papers away, and if they didn't have them away by then, they'd likely be dead. As soon as the door was open Tseng pushed it open, and Vincent slipped past him, to disable security cameras and check to see that the house was really empty.

Nine minutes. Vincent was taking too long. He wasn't, really, but even though Tseng was counting the seconds, it seemed to take longer before the man reappeared and beckoned him into the house. He shoved the door shut behind him and dashed up to the study, thinking desperately. Where would they be? The man's desk? Near his bed? Hidden in a bookshelf in the living room? It felt as if there was not enough time to check them all, but they had to find the things.

The study and the man's bedroom were connected. Tseng started in the bedroom, looking through the closet and under the bed, scanning quickly for signs of any secret compartments, running his hands along the hardwood floor to feel for seams in the wood. Nothing here, though there were a few things stashed in the back of the closet that the man might not want to get out. The head Turk filed them away in his mind, if they needed blackmail later.

In the study, the most obvious place to check was the desk. It was a large piece of furniture, made of solid oak and carved decoratively. Tseng checked the drawers for traps then opened them, though it wasn't likely for the papers to be there. He couldn't leave any place out. But there were no secret compartments or places to hide anything in the desk. Tseng was a bit relieved. There were lots of nasty traps that could be hidden in a desk, ones that you couldn't see until they got your hand and filled you with poison, or set off an alarm.

Either way, he had finished with the two rooms. They had five minutes left. He darted out of the master suite and met Vincent on the stairs, who simply shook his head when Tseng opened his mouth to ask. The papers had to be downstairs, then.

The two of them were searching through the living room as fast as they could, while still being thorough. The place was more cluttered, but there were places where it couldn't have been hidden, simply because the room was accessible to everyone who came into the house. They silently split up- Tseng worked his way through the bookshelf, and Vincent started checking the general odd places in the rest of the room.

"Here!" Tseng's loud whisper immediately got Vincent's attention, and he whipped around to stand next to the head Turk.

Tseng was resting his hand on one of the books on the shelf, about to take it off, but not yet about to. Instead he was examining the shelving around the book.

Vincent looked at Tseng, then at the book. "Are you certain?" he asked in his gravelly voice.

Finally certain that he wasn't going to set anything off by taking the book, Tseng pulled it off the shelf and flipped through it. Triumph and relief flashed across his face as he found a manila folder in the back of it, and flipped through its contents. "Yes, this is it," he breathed. "We've got it."

Tseng put the book back on the shelf and tucked the folder into his jacket, making sure that it was secure, but out of the way. When he moved the jacket, he felt the weight of the PHS in his pocket, and immediately remembered the time limit.

"Shit! We have to leave!" Tseng hissed. He looked frantically around to make sure that nothing was out of place. The man would be coming in through the front door of the house, so they had to leave through the back. He would be almost here- there was less than a minute left; they had taken too much time.

He dashed to the back door, with Vincent following close behind again. The downstairs floor had a confusing layout- he accidentally went to the kitchen, and had to double back. Tseng was getting more and more nervous. Ten minutes of agonizing searching, and the time before that, had frayed his nerves. He just wanted to get out by now.

The back door was right there, and he hurried to it. It wouldn't be locked so that no one could get out. They were going to get out. He reached out to grab the knob.

"Wait—" Vincent reached out to grab his arm, and Tseng whipped his head around to look at the red-eyed man, even as he turned the knob. Something in the door _clicked_ with sickening finalty, and then everything disappeared in a burst of white.

* * *

Gaia, he ached. That was the only think Tseng could feel as he woke up. His whole body felt like it had been run over, maybe by Reno. There was a much more concentrated pain in his arm, and his back felt like it had been fried and put through a cheese-grater. Trying to move off of it didn't help, because then his whole torso hurt. He gave a pained whimper and lay still again.

Slowly, Tseng became aware of more than just his abused body. He remembered the latest mission in more and more detail, from the rushed helicopter trip to the house with the files to waiting for the right moment to actually finding the papers and putting them in his coat. Then, finally…

"Who the _hell _rigs their back door with _explosives?_" Tseng asked as he opened his eyes, to find himself staring at the familiar ceiling of Edge's hospital. Really, he had been here far too often. It had only been built three years ago, and he already knew the place by heart.

A chuckle from the foot of his bed dragged Tseng's attention away from the ceiling and to the redhead seated in the hospital room. "This guy, apparently," Reno said as he pulled his chair up closer to the head of Tseng's hospital bed. Tseng noticed Vincent Valentine in the bed next to his own, with bandages over his face and apparently still unconscious. Reno reached out to pat Tseng's head condescendingly. "But then again, you forgot to check for traps, so it's your fault, yo," the redhead said with a smirk.

Tseng sighed morosely. He would never hear the end of this, not until Reno failed even more spectacularly than he had just done. "Does Rufus have the documents?" he asked, ignoring his own humiliation for the moment. As long as the mission had been successful, he could carry himself with some dignity.

Reno nodded. "They didn't even get damaged, 'cause you were facing away from the explosion," he said seriously.

It was the best thing he had heard in a long time. Tseng let out a relieved breath and reached up to run a hand through his hair, only to pause when his arm felt heavier than it should have been. He glanced down to see a brace on the arm, with bandages underneath.

"Compound fracture," Reno explained. "Your back's torn up pretty bad, too. Doctors want you to stay in the hospital for a while longer." He grinned. "Not that it'll get you out of work- now that we have those papers, it's snooping and hacking and desk work."

Once again, Tseng didn't bother to comment on Reno's attempted jab at him. He had learned long ago not to rise to the bait. "What about Valentine?" he asked, looking across at the man. He was nervous about having the ex-Turk in the hospital. He knew how the man felt about doctors, and he did not want to be there to witness any freak-out the man might have when he woke up.

Reno shrugged. "He got hit in the face by it, mostly. Got a piece of shrapnel lodged in his leg, and a few burns, but he's a modified son of a bitch, so he's healing up fast. AVALANCHE has been dropping by to check on him, and they'll get him out of the hospital as soon as he wakes up."

Another relief. Having Vincent crippled or seriously hurt because of his stupidity would not have helped relations between AVALANCHE and the Turks. Besides, he liked the man, and he wouldn't have been able to live with himself if he'd done that.

Apparently, Reno had not stopped talking, and Tseng had tuned him out. "You know, it just proves my point," he said.

"Proves what point?" Tseng asked, confused. What was Reno going on about now?

The redhead gestured wildly around the room, apparently indicating both Tseng and Vincent. "You two! You're not dead, yo! You survived an explosion at, like point-blank range. And that's just this time. You've done the same thing, both of you, plenty of other times. The torture with the remnants, getting shot, practically being cut in half, fighting Deepground. Both of you are practically immortal, yo! That's why I keep saying that the good Turks don't die!" Reno gave him a smug smirk.

Leveling himself up so that he could hit Reno with his good arm was painful, but there were some things that just needed to be done. "Stop getting stupid ideas!"


End file.
